Disappearing files on external HD

Hello,

A few weeks ago I found that contents of a sub sub folder on my Western Digital external HD had disappeared.

A week later, a lot more files had disappeared.

Now every single file on this HD is missing leaving only the topmost folders empty and one file that is in no folder with a size of 133MB.

I looked in the Trash but there is nothing there.

Checking Properties on the whole drive shows that 142.73GB is available out of 500GB max. So, 357.27GB is on the disk.

In Disk Utility, I see the drive and under it I see the drive named which has File System MacOS Extended (Journaled) and shows 42,079 files in 34,897 folders (that seems wrong, the number of folders).

I tried to Verify - "Needs to be Repaired"
I tried to Repair - "Couldn't Unmount disk"
I tried to Unmount - "Make sure all applications and files are closed on this disk" - they are

Finally, when I try to eject the disk, it says that I can't because "one or more programs may be using it" though I can't see how anything is.

Now what can I do?

G'day and welcome to the forums.

How are you backing up? Hopefully CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. In this case the drive will be bootable, so see if you can boot from it. Then reboot and enter Recovery and run Repair Disk. Alas it looks like you are in the market for a replacement eternal hard drive.

Make sure you backup regularly whilst awaiting a new drive.

Welcome to our forums.

As Harry advised above, hopefully you have those files backed up somewhere else? It appears that your WD drive is in the process of completely failing. Try rebooting your machine with the drive attached. After it boots back up, try again to eject the drive. It should eject. Then once more see if you can repair it with Disk Utility.

I hate to say this, but lately external Western Digital drives especially the "My Passport" models seem to be especially troublesome.

I ended up using a bootup USB to try to repair the drive. While it didn't succeed in fixing it, it did allow me to see the contents once restarted. Unfortunately, hardly anything successfully could be transferred to other media as it either crapped out or said that the file was being used by another program (which it wasn't).

Luckily, almost nothing doesn't exist elsewhere... except for all my images shot in 2015. Now I have to decide if $250 is worth it to pay to save the 10% of the data on there that isn't replaceable.

So, the question I wonder is, why the **** do we use external drives if they die so frequently?

Everything dies. Backup your important data as soon as possible. I understand it is too late now, but now you understand the importance of copies.